Every tech vendor on the planet is now officially targeting the Chief Marketing Officer with IT products and otherwise doing everything in its power to make it easy for marketing departments to buy its stuff. That must be kind of hard for the person who was the traditional gatekeeper for the IT strategy and budget.

Now IBM is getting in on the act, offering a new marketplace of 100 SaaS applications divvied up into categories for different cadres of IT buyers. And (IBM being IBM) that list is extensive, leading off with the CMO but also including sales and eCommerce leaders; customer care and support executives; Chief Procurement Officers; Chief Supply Chain Officers; General Counsel; Chief Financial Officers; Chief Human Resource Officers. Oh yes, and then Chief Information Officers.

This list speaks to a certain amount of title inflation: I was surprised not to see Chief Innovation Officer, one of the newer C-level buzzword bingo titles on that list, but give it time.

Target: Chief Marketing Officer

IBM’s move to make its SaaS apps more easily found and purchased by CMOs comes a few weeks after Salesforce.com dropped a cool $2.5 billion on ExactTarget, an email marketing company that also focuses on marketing execs. Just this morning, SendGrid, which traditionally sells to developers of web applications, launched an email tool for marketing pros that will compete with MailChimp. Marketo  last week launched its first product since its IPO, which uses machine learning to tailor email pitches according to customer activity.

And don’t forget that Oracle bought Eloqua, a marketing automation company, for nearly $900 million in December. NetSuite got into marketing automation early, having purchased a couple professional services companies, Retail Anywhere, Order Motion, and Element Fusion over the past few years and is now touting a big customer win with Williams Sonoma. Clearly there’s a trend here.

Is the CMO really in charge of IT? Should he or she be?

But all this “buying-power-goes-to-the-CMO” talk, which we covered back in September, still smacks of a fad to me. Someone at the customer organization needs to have a holistic picture of what’s being bought and deployed if only to make sure that the company gets the best volume discount for any SaaS service used.  That person may not be the CIO but it better be someone with a firm grasp not only of technology per se, but a working knowledge of service level agreements and compliance issues. I doubt that most CMOs want to take that on, but I could be wrong and I’m sure you’ll let me know.

At the MIT CIO Symposium last month, Michael Relich, EVP and CIO of Guess Inc., said that in a perfect universe “CMOs and CIOs should be best friends,” because CMOs need data and to get it they need point-of-sale and e-commerce systems that are all about IT. But when asked if CMOs will get more IT budget than CIOs, Relich said: “Over my dead body.”

And that brings me to Structure this week where GigaOM will host a panel by CIOs on their role in the modern IT organization. I’ll be sure to ask them what they think of this marketing automation extravaganza and the purported rise of the CMO.

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“We need to buy more marketing companies. We want to be the company you turn to for sales, service, marketing and the platform,” CEO Marc Benioff told analysts on the company’s fourth quarter earnings call Thursday afternoon. “We want to grow organically and via acquisition.”

For its fourth quarter, the company reported a loss of $20.8 million, compared to a loss of $4.1 million for the same period last year.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff speaking in New York this week.

Marketing technology has become a hot spot over the past few years. Salesforce.com ponied up $326 million for Radian6 (social media monitoring) in 2011 and then $800 million for Buddy Media (social marketing) to buy both mind share and market share. But rivals have also spent big — Oracle bought Eloqua a few months ago for $871 million. The working theory behind this activity, as Benioff said on the call, is the belief that at some point in the near future chief marketing officers (CMOs) will have more IT buying power than CIOs.

Asked what Salesforce should do to counter Oracle/Eloqua, Benioff returned to the acquisition trail: “I think we’ll buy small and big. We’re going to be aggressive and look at everything.”

Salesforce.com, which started out as a customer relationship management (CRM) or sales-force automation (SFA) company, now also focuses on three other businesses: marketing; help desk type services (desk.com) and “the platform.” The latter is presumably both Force.com, the company’s internal development platform and Heroku, the Platform as a Service it bought three years ago.

But it’s difficult to get any feel for how those newer businesses are faring — although Salesforce did lay off a hundred or so employees from Buddy Media and Radian6 last fall. Asked about traction for its “non-SFA businesses,” CFO Graham Smith didn’t get specific, referring to comments made at the company’s Dreamforce show last fall. “It’s been a pretty gradual shift. I suspect it’s close to what we said then with 55 percent [of business] SFA and 45 percent non-SFA … As our more recently acquired businesses grow at a faster rate than sales cloud we’d expect a shift away from SFA but hopefully not too fast.”

Benioff did say that social advertising — in the marketing group — is probably the company’s fastest growing business. But it would be really nice to hear what sort of new, non SFA accounts are buying these new services and how much overlap there is between its CRM customers and consumers of these other services.

Your guess is as good as mine, because Salesforce.com ain’t sharing.

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The Chandler, Ariz.-based company, which offers a SaaS suite comprising both CRM and marketing automation to small companies, will use the new money to educate small businesses about the value of an all-in-one SaaS suite and to add functions to CRM and lead generation services, Infusionsoft CEO and Co-Founder Clate Mask told me.

Infusionsoft CEO and co-founder Clate Mask.

In November, Hubspot, another marketing automation player, netted $35 million in mezzanine funding and just before Christmas, Oracle said it was shelling out $871 million to buy Eloqua, another, more enterprise-focused, marketing automation vendor. All of these vendors aimto help customers find and qualify leads — from online or other ads, from Facebook, from Twitter and other sources and convert them into actual sales. Many companies now use a hodgepodge of different processes and products for this purpose.

While there is some contention with Hubspot, Infusionsoft targets smaller companies — those with 25 employees or fewer and more than $100,000 in annual revenue — of which there are an estimated 27 million in the US alone — while Hubspot focuses on the bigger companies in the small and medium business (SMB) market, Mask said.

Infusionsoft offers these companies CRM integrated with marketing automation — the practice of culling and promoting leads. “On the CRM side we compete with Salesforce.com and Zoho while on the marketing automation side we see Marketo, Eloqua and Hubspot. “But we’re the only sales and marketing company that is 100 percent focused on truly small businesses — of which there are 27 million in the US alone,” Mask told me in an interview.

Doug Burgum, founding partner of Arthur Ventures and the executive who led Microsoft’s business applications group, will advise Infusionsoft, Mask said. The company has 350 employees but plans to staff up to more than 1,000 over three years .

This round brings total funding to about $74 million. Other, earlier, investors include Mohr Davidow Ventures and Signal Peak Ventures.

There’s been a lot of talk that chief marketing officers (CMOs) will soon control more IT spending than CIOs. I’m not necessarily buying that contention — especially since many of those stories seem to be written by CMOs, but it’s clear that marketing departments have their own budgets so tech vendors that can speak their language and offer value could do well. As long as that’s the case, don’t expect this category to calm down anytime soon. Feeding that fire, Mask said to stay tuned for an Infusionsoft acquisition in the coming months.

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The deal will mean more competition with Oracle rival Salesforce.com which bought Buddy Media for $689 million in June and is adding more marketing expertise to its portfolio as well as help Oracle compete against other companies like Marketo and Hubspot, which recently snagged $35 million in new venture backing. There are differences: Hubspot focuses on inbound marketing — culling likely prospects from  Facebook, Twitter etc. and targeting them. Eloqua’s specialties lie more in lead management and reporting and analysis of marketing programs. Another factor is that many researchers predict that Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) will get have big budgets for IT acquisitions that help them do their jobs better.

And, as is often the case  in Oracle acquisitions, the real end game may be customer acquisition. More customers equals more maintenance and support revenue, and for Oracle, maintenance and support revenue remain crucial. Eloqua claims 1,200 customers including Dow Jones, Aon, Schroders, and SBLI use its software to find and cultivate qualified leads and to target marketing to those potential customers.

In a letter to Eloqua’s customers  Oracle SVP Thomas Kurian said:

Eloqua delivers marketing automation and revenue performance management software that ensures every component of marketing works harder and more efficiently to drive revenue. More than 1,200 organizations across a wide range of industries rely on Eloqua’s modern marketing cloud to automate complex marketing processes across multiple channels, to target and nurture prospects, and to deliver highly qualified leads at a lower cost to sales teams. Customers are better able to track, capture and analyze a potential buyer’s Digital Body Language, including their preferences, behavior and decision-making processes, to more accurately score and qualify leads and identify high quality prospects. Eloqua will become the centerpiece of the Oracle Marketing Cloud.

Oracle’s acquisitions over the past month or so show how eclectic its interests are: It bought DataRaker for its energy analytics expertise last week; invested Engine Yard, the PaaS company earlier in the month, and bought Instantis for its portfolio management just before that.

What’s next? Your guess is as good as mine.

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